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Plammox writes "A non-profit suborbital space endeavor lead by Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen is trying to put a man in space. The first test of the boosters and space craft in combination with the sea launch platform will take place this week. The catch? All of this is a non-profit project based on voluntary labor and sponsors. How will they get the launch platform out in the middle of the Baltic sea to perform the test? With the founder's home-built submarine pushing it, of course."

Why do so many people have a grasp of rocketry as "stuff other people have already done". When you think about learning guitar do you ever find yourself saying "nah, they already did that in the '50s".

Yeah, but playing the guitar is useful. Manned space flight was a stunt then, it's a stunt now. It serves no purpose whatsoever, except to give hardons to nerds and deluded Space Nutters who think we'll be mining asteroids next.

So you think giving hardons is useless? I can tell you that a whole industry is built on it!:-)

On a more serious note: Where do you suggest we get our minerals from when we have used up all supplies of some element found here on earth, if not through space mining?

Because they are doing it the way true pioneers do. Not by requesting grants from some big government and untangling miles of red tape. Not by licking some politicians ass helping him get a few votes subcontracting some part to a company in his district.

it means individuals are close to mastering trans continental missiles, and that worries me a bit

Why? Why would a hobbyist's dream worry you more than some dictator's nightmare?

Better live in a society where people have constructive hobbies like this than in a society where the only encouraged activity is to memorize some long dead prophet's words.

Because they are doing it the way true pioneers do. Not by requesting grants from some big government and untangling miles of red tape. Not by licking some politicians ass helping him get a few votes subcontracting some part to a company in his district.

Because NASA and the US Air Force in the 1950s were the home of rugged anti-government individualism, free of all political pressure?

Right, on October 1st, 1958, NACA ceased to exist and NASA began. NASA began by absorbing all of NACA's facilities, property, and people. So what happened, was 8000 people got a new badge, and a new name on their paychecks. The NACA dates back to Orville Wright.

In my experience, the primary goal of QA is to generate documentation to prove the project owners did due diligence, and then in a distant second place, to actually find bugs and faults.
Did I mention they use a $15 hair dryer to keep some of their valves warm at high altitudes? It will be interesting how far they get using this approach.

Is it really possible that people can actually have a quality built product like those old Louis XIV furniture pieces or custom built Mazeratis that aren't mass-produced scale of economy products? You know once upon a time, quality didn't depend on an assembly line. Assembly lines are good for producing large quantities of products, but they they don't have any lock on quality. Just mass pro

You are most probably not going to mine for energy sources in space. You are going to mine for rare elements. You can have plenty of energy, and yet run out of rare elements. And most of the infrastructure needed would remain in space forever, so except for the initial cost, you'd have quite moderate resource need.

There's another thread of interest in there, involving an organization that aims to become the "sourceforge.net" of aerospace engineering. Their site should be ready within another week or so, as a collaborative development environment, skill-matching social network, and space science/engineering knowledgebase.

It also happens, their first official act will be a grant of approximately 5000$ towards Copenhagen Suborbitals. We have raised about 1500$ so far.

Keep in mind, this isn't the final vehicle design. This is just the first prototype, and they are sending up a crash test dummy. In the Something Awful thread I linked above, they talk about redesigning to make the position more feasible for a living person to go up in. The final rocket design is larger than the one they are preparing to test launch, which will have more room for better positions.

As for G-suits, I think they mentioned using the kind of flight suit that Chinese MiG pilots use. I'm sure a sea

Only in direct monetary terms. Many politicians got votes from NASA projects. If you plot the geographic locations of NASA subcontractors you'll see they are spread all over the USA, every one gets a piece of that pork barrel.

If you add non-monetary profits, then this one also gets profit: The people doing it get wider recognition and certainly an ego boost, provided they succeed (but not succeeding usually implies no profit anyway).

This is a common misconception, fuelled by people who really hate spaceflight.

The United States (and the world) made HUGE profits on the space program, even after funding Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, from the savings from improved weather prediction (and, in particular, hurricane tracking and landfall location prediction).

We built the boosters, we built the satellites, we saved enough on people not getting killed that the rest of the program was free, in fact immensely profitable.

Whenever I go into an air and space museum it indeed makes me very happy to pause and reflect how angry some people get that NASA research is government funded. If you don't like your tax money going to space exploration, apply the free market principles you love so well and move to somalia.

Someday you're going to realize we don't live in a just world where your dreams come true if you just wait long enough. Faced with that knowledge, you'll actually have to start making decisions and living with the consequences. I hope one of the decisions you make will be to go outside more and learn about the world.

FYI, it is. They've even released the blueprints for this thing under an open source license (I don't know which one... the site is down at the moment) and are also planning on sharing any data they've received from the flights including performance data under similar licenses.

Damn, that riding position reminds me of being stuck in an MRI machine. Between the that cramped arms at your side position to the openness of the canopy around your head its going to take someone with extreme mental fortitude to take the ride.

They have been running a blog since the beginning on ing.dk (in danish only, unfortunately). Openness is key to the project, that's how they attract the donations that make up all funding.

The astronaut sitting upright is a key part of the design. The spaceship is 60cm in diameter. If he lies down the spaceship needs to be much wider, around 2 metres, and then require a much larger booster rocket.

They aim at a constant acceleration of 4G, which is not very much for a rocket, but this is to make it liveable in the upright position.

Another key part of the design is that it is a hybrid rocket, which has high power, is controllable, and is almost without dangers compared to traditional liquid and solid fuel rockets.

The fuel is actually some rubber substance (not entirely unlike tyre rubber), with liquid oxygen being pumped through to make it burn at high temps. Totally harmless substances, except when you ignite them, produces great thrust, and is even variable, so they can just turn it off if something goes wrong.

Until now they have only been doing static booster tests (all successful). The upcoming launch is the very first flight test. They only aim at going to some 20 km's altitude. The eventual goal is to replace Sven the test dummy with Peter Madsen, and thrust him to above 100 km's - and get him down safely.

I'm proud to be a donor, and this is one of the best expenditures I've ever done.

Once I knew about them one year ago (through Slashdot, by the way) I told my wife: "If I stop being a rocket modelling fan forever, will you let me give them the money I planned to spend on rocket models for the rest of my life? It could be the way to be part of a really big thing".

And she said: "Ok, but I don't want to know if he dies or not".

I think it's a fair deal, so I gave them a huge amount of money and I won't tell her about the final result.

Okay, now I'm jealous. I used to think I was DIY for building my own satellite (Project Calliope [projectcalliope.com]), but... man, I'm using someone else's rocket instead of building my own. I feel so old fashioned. The Copenhagen group are totally awesome!

Not to rain on the parade...
So, what are the military applications for this missile, I mean rocket, design?
Is there any information here we would not want some smaller, more radical, country to possess?
Could the passenger space hold a big canister of some chemical or biological agent you would rather not meet up with?
- Paranoid in Michigan

What would be the military implications? For those countries who are striving for missiles already have them (North Korea, Iran, Libya, Somalia, etc.) so there is little point in having a "spy" grab plans for a volunteer effort in Denmark and bring it to one of those countries. What counts is the labor and effort happening there to get this whole thing to work.

Besides, the flight profile for a weapon is quite a bit different than what you want for manned spaceflight. For a weapon, you want to have maximu

So, what are the military applications for this missile, I mean rocket, design?

The builders themselves describe it as "less high tech then an off the shelf scud". AFAIK, there is not really any navigation in it, apart from small thrusters which allow the pilot to spin the rocket around its own axis for panoramic viewing. And their civilian GPS is subsonic only, so they have to wait for the chutes to deploy before they even know where the fuck the thing went. They built the launching platform for less money than what it would cost to rent a decent pram for a week. This project is

If you can shoot 120 km straight up you can shoot less than twice as far if you pick a 45 degree angle. 240km rockets are nothing special for most nations who care about such things. If you have a hardened payload and safety isn't a major concern, solid-fuelled rockets are probably easier.

Those Deolaters among you might want to entreat on the behalf of Fraa Jad.
Seems to me the greatest danger here is whoever rides atop this may have trouble with space junk being drawn into orbit around his/her giant balls.

For anyone wondering, there's another little project in the works, designed to help support existing organizations such as Copenhagen Suborbitals, as well as individuals interested in manned space exploitation. Aka, the Open Space Movement.

The gist of this project is something akin to "sourceforge.net" for aerospace engineering, although that would be a gross oversimplification. The OSM operates on the principle that public involvement is the key to large-scale manned spaceflight in the near future, and operates as a service and organizational platform to help rally public interest, and direct their efforts towards a series of public space ventures.

The site is nearing completion, and should be ready for a beta test in the next week or two. When we begin operations, the first thing we have planned is providing a grant towards Copenhagen Suborbitals. We have raised ~1500 out of 5000$ so far [chipin.com]. Having talked with Kristian von Bengstrom, this amount is roughly equivalent to the cost of the propellants used in the HEAT-1X motor. More importantly, providing a 5000$ grant now makes it possible to provide a 50,000$ grant in the future - since the primary incentive behind our donation model is to show exactly what we've spent money on, and what advances have come out of it.

(we intend to spend money on in-house user-submitted projects as well, but a grant is easier to perform at this stage)

basically a glorified carnival ride, a couple of magnitudes easier than fully orbital.

Considering they are launching it from a sea launch platform they built, which will be towed to sea with the submarine they built, I'd say this is several orders of magnitude more awesome than what anybody else ever did.

Let's see, how many orders of magnitude harder things have you ever done? Links, please.

Then consider this: The excitement of this single project will probably make many more kids in Denmark want to enter science than any previous marketing driven campaign for recruiting engineering students. It shows the awesome feeling of putting theory into practice and how far you can get if you have one determined team of talented folks.

How does busting your brain off in Physics for years to take a McJob feel?"

:) Hmmm... Is this your own experience projected?
If someone is busting their brains off in Physics, then maybe this field isn't for them? Science and engineering certainly isn't fun for everyone. This is about spurring excitement in kids about building things with their own hands and come up with practical solutions to the problems they encounter. Secondly, I think you're taking things too literally here, this is not just about making kids enter space engineering (even though there are a fair number of job

"Please do not open the safety belt, keep your hands inside the cart and remember to take and hold a big breath before getting out of atmosphere. Oh, and cover your face on the way down, so it won't melt."

Orbital is much more dangerous. Re-entry at hypersonic speeds is not an easy problem to solve.

I don't agree. Rocks do it all the time but admittedly pull a lot of gees. Build a carbon fibre sphere, coat it with an ablative heat shield. Tell the occupants to slide around inside so the heat is shared across the surface. Build a couple of doors with explosive devices which can open them even if the heat shield has melted them closed. Punch out at five km altitude and land with conventional parachutes.

If you want to get complex build a double cone: shallow cone with head shield on the bottom. Steep cone

Even if you find the right mix of materials for the heat shield, you'll still need to get the angle just right. Too steep, and the g-forces will kill you, the shield will get extremely hot, and it will be subjected to huge pressures. Too shallow, and the heat shield will be subjected to heat for much longer, so it has time to conduct through.

Jumping out with a regular parachute on your back requires an accurate landing. It's not so much fun in the middle of the Atlantic with nobody near your location.

Why do spacecraft have to enter the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds? Can't we use thrusters to slide on in like an old school vet? I've always wondered that..... particularly with a craft with wings.? Match the rotational velocity of the earth or something..

Say you burn all your fuel to get into orbit. Thats a velocity change of about 8 km/s. To get down under power you would need to change your speed by 8 km/s again, but all the fuel you need for that would have to be carried up in the first place.

A good launch vehicle has a mass ratio of 1/10, meaning that roughly 90% of the launch mass is going to be fuel. If your fuel mass for landing is the same as the the fuel mass just to get the empty vehicle into orbit, the total mass of the vehicle at launch will increase by a factor of 10.

Its just impractical. To land on any large planet you need to use aerobraking.

Why? Entry vehicles have been invented many times for many purposes. A vehicle was built to enter Jupiter at 50 km/s. As early as the 1950s simple entry vehicles were used to return film from spy satellites.